


Marvels in the Eyes of the Makers

by Cherepashka



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Astronomy, Bioluminescence, Botany, Corporeality, Emotional Support, F/F, Middle-earth and science, Multi, Physics, Valar having disagreements, Valar working together, Worldbuilding, Zoology, collaborative projects, gestures of physical affection, gift-giving, literal building of the world, nonmonogamous relationships, origins of life on Arda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-26 19:23:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20394883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherepashka/pseuds/Cherepashka
Summary: Affectionate moments between Varda and Yavanna in the spring of Arda.Based on lovely art bydrawingelves. Written for TRSB19.





	Marvels in the Eyes of the Makers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [drawingelves](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=drawingelves).

> Check out the full-size art [here](https://drawingelves.tumblr.com/post/187352639283/an-hold-drawing-for-tolkien-reversed-summer-bang). 
> 
> This fic includes a lot of both my and drawingelves' headcanons about the Valar and the early creation of Arda. Thank you for engaging in such a fun brainstorming process, and for making such delightful art!

________________

At first she is a voice among voices, and the voices fill the Void. She sings, simple melodies at first, but as she listens to her fellows her song quickly grows brighter, more complex, trills and cascades chasing one another in a fractal web of sound. One voice catches at her consciousness and draws her into counterpoint: a silver-clear voice that sings of energy and light. She picks up the melody line and weaves her own themes around it, improvising, adding fugal variations. Other voices join them, and she sings warmth and growth and swiftness over the familiar, weighty tones of her beloved, and threads merry dances through the deep and liquid melodies of her friend. The simple joy of it, of Music and creation and collaboration, floods her.

And when she sees Eru’s vision of what their voices have wrought, she is awed.

***

Arda will be green and beautiful, Yavanna knows, for she saw its beauty in Music and vision, but at the moment it is rocky and gray and still filled with the dying flames of battle.

And it lacks the materials she needs.

“How,” she asks Aulë, who is preoccupied with the shaping of a caldera, “am I supposed to make growing things, when most of what I have to work with is inert? When there is so little of the materials that will change, mix, _react_, when brought into contact with each other?”

Aulë shrugs, setting off a minor avalanche and cracking the caldera’s rim. He _likes_ the aesthetic of ‘rocky, grey, and volcanic’, bless him; the iron, magnesium, and silicon that are his favorite playthings surround them in abundance. But while Yavanna can appreciate the drama of the landscapes her husband fashions, she needs more volatile materials if she wants to make creatures that can self-replicate well enough to create hospitable climes for one another.

Manwë, wafting by with supreme unconcern, interjects, “If they are meant to come to Arda, they will come.” Yavanna does not bother to point out that she addressed Aulë, not him. Ever since he clothed Arda in breezes, it has been impossible to have a private conversation unless the participants speak mind-to-mind. “They were sung in the Music, and with time they will come.”

Yavanna huffs. (There are, she will admit, certain benefits to having breezes; breezes mean breath, when she takes physical form, and breath means all sorts of wonderfully expressive ways of conveying exasperation. She has been experimenting not only with huffs but with sighs, snorts, and percussive laughs.) “Yes, but the Music won’t come into being if we do not work at it, will it. It needs craft, and craft needs supplies.”

The breezes give a humorous ripple. “Then look not only to the earth, creature-crafter.”

It would be uncharitable to wish that Manwë, whom they all acknowledge is closest to Eru’s thought, would deign to be a bit more specific when divulging what he knows.

But then, this was meant to be a collaborative effort. Yavanna thinks back to the Music, to that little silver-clear melody-line that inspired her into improvisation. Who sang it? _Look not only to the earth._

Above her, the stars twinkle.

Aulë looks up from his work. In this form he is nearly indistinguishable from the molten rock he sings up from below to buttress the mountain. But she sees a fissure widen in an encouraging smile. “Go on, then,” he says.

***

_Yes,_ says Varda, when Yavanna comes to her to explain what she needs. _I think I have what you seek._

“Oh, wonderful!” Flowers sprout along the form Yavanna has taken, which is bipedal this time, with a quartet of clever, prehensile upper limbs. They’re not real flowers, of course, only semblances—the real ones won’t be ready for quite some time, and Yavanna has said she has some ideas for ferns that must be put into action first—but Varda nonetheless enjoys the effect. Yavanna often tests her plans for the _olvar_ and _kelvar_ of Arda by trying on their forms herself, and now she flows so easily from _fana_ to _fana_ that Varda could almost read her mood just from her body, without touching her mind at all. Varda herself rarely chooses to make her inmost thoughts so visible, but she has to admit that the flowers are a beautiful way to express excitement.

_We shall have to bring some down from the skies, though,_ she muses.

Yavanna laughs; that will be an easy enough problem for them to solve, now that the Valar’s work has given Arda enough weight to exert a significant attractive force. “Come on, then!” She whirls, showering amaryllis and bougainvillea in her wake.

Varda corporealises a bit, just enough to reach out a tendril that is as much light as matter to catch at one of the falling blooms. The flowers, though, wink out of existence as soon as they fully detach from Yavanna’s hair. “You’ll need more of a body than that!” she teases.

Varda has not spent as much time in material form as Yavanna and some of the others have, for she works mainly on scales too vast or too miniscule to support the sorts of _fana_ best suited to Arda’s surface. But now she tries out a bipedal shape to mirror Yavanna’s, adding shimmering appendages as Yavanna waves her own.

“Joints! You need joints if you want them to articulate!”

Varda laughs, light emissions rippling with colour, and reshapes her limbs so that they can bend and grasp and move.

“Nessa showed me this,” Yavanna says, a note of mischief in her voice, and that is all the warning Varda has before Yavanna clasps the end of one of her limbs and pulls her into a twirl.

Varda has seen Nessa dance, of course, and many of the Valar who spend most of their time embodied give in to the urge from time to time as well. Yavanna mostly dances with Aulë, and often enough with Ulmo and Vána. For Varda, the great movements of nova and nebula are a dance all their own, and until now she has not felt the need to take on any other shape. But it is a new delight to dance with a partner, _fana_ clasped to _fana_, though Varda is not so much a body in movement as she is movement itself only barely contained to a body, particles in a frenzy of fusion and light spilling off her in waves, a violet beyond even the purple of the amaryllis in Yavanna’s hair.

Neither of them notices the pieces of the stars that blaze through Manwë’s winds to fall to earth, though the bombardment leaves dents and craters in the surface of the ground.

***

“A little warning, next time, please,” Aulë grumbles, “if you are going to send a barrage of comets and meteors into my crust! Parts of it haven’t finished setting and cooling.” He sits at one end of a magnificent valley, working on a collaboration with Ulmo. Ulmo, though he found ice horrifying the first time Melkor’s machinations turned his beloved water solid, has since come around to its utility as a sculpting tool. At the other end of the valley stands a massive rounded granite formation that has been sheared neatly in half by Ulmo’s glaciers. The effect is quite dramatic.

Yavanna laughs, and beside her Varda, discarnated again, flickers her own amusement.

“My apologies, husband.” Her voice carries no traces of repentance, but she bends to drop a placating kiss atop the bald granite dome that is currently serving as Aulë’s head. The starlight reflects quite prettily off the flecks of quartz in his pate.

Lichen will set off the effect perfectly, she thinks. Bright patches of orange lichen. Varda’s star-fragments have delivered exactly what she sought: an abundance of volatile, generous substances that are eager to lend bits of themselves to other materials. A little more of that purple-beyond-purple light, and she will have her first self-replicating life-forms. After that, progress will be quick. She can probably coax her creations from protozoa to plankton to land-rooted plants in half the time the first prototypes took her.

“We shall cease making the sky rain boulders if you promise not to release so many sulphur fumes when you, Manwë, and Ulmo craft your hot springs,” she tells Aulë.

“What’s wrong with sulphur?”

Yavanna exchanges a knowing brush of mind against mind with Varda, and then informs her husband, “The stench, for one.”

“You don’t like the smell of sulphur?” He hunches up his shoulders into a pair of lesser summits.

Yavanna sighs with exaggerated patience, then makes herself hands so that she can scoop up a mass of pulverized rock from a moraine at Aulë’s feet. She lets it tumble through her fingers over his back, and then presses the heels of her hands into his shoulders so that touch will take the sting from her words. “Your experiments with temperature and pressure have produced some astonishing results in other respects, my dear, but they have not resulted in appealing fragrances.”

“I thought you said sulphur was useful for your work.”

She gives his shoulders a squeeze, watching little veins of ore spread through them in response. “Not so much in its vapour form, love. I really only use that for protein decay, though I will admit your hot springs are delicious for the _fana_. But I have another project for you—for all of us, really.” She turns to Varda now with a smile. “The stars are wonderful, really they are, but I have plans for creatures that will need a warmer light, and stronger.”

“Hm. Lamps, perhaps,” Aulë muses. “Have to be tall, though, tall enough to overtop my mountains.” A thoughtful little earthquake ripples through the valley. Yavanna will fill it with trees soon, great evergreens of mighty girth, and beneath them by the creek-beds, slender white-barked beauties with leaves of trembling gold. A haven she will make of it, for creatures that burrow and creatures that graze, and of course a few hunters to keep things in balance.

_With light of different colors,_ Varda murmurs into their minds, _to shine over different parts of Arda, so that all the different living things you make will have a place._

“Yes!” Yavanna cries, sprouting scales in pleasure that the others have caught her thought so quickly. The scales spread across her _fana_, tessellating to merge with the rough bark-patterns that already cover her. “And then,” she sighs with longing, “then we can have green.”

***

Varda comes upon her again when she is crown-deep in Ulmo’s domain, swirling a tentacle through the cluster of plankton she has made. Green covers much of Arda, now, and slowly but surely it has changed the quality of Manwë’s winds. If Yavanna read Eru’s vision aright, the Children, when they come, will need to breathe, and her _olvar_—these plankton included—bear the important responsibility of achieving the right mix of winds.

_They are lovely,_ Varda says. The compliment makes Yavanna blush bright orange until she is nearly invisible against the coral behind her. She pulses her mantle and, with an effort, reverts to a more neutral mottled pink.

_This isn’t all they can do,_ she says. _Would you like to see?_

_Please._

_We will need to move them farther from the light._

Yavanna takes on a larger form, one of the largest designs she has considered yet, with a prominent dorsal ridge and a powerful fluked tail to propel herself through long stretches of ocean. Opening her wide mouth, she strains the plankton through the fibrous plates that guard it and holds them there as she begins to swim away from Almaren and the mingled lights of Ormal and Illuin. Varda follows, speckles of light reflecting off the whitecaps.

When the only light that reaches them is that of the stars, Yavanna dematerializes, releasing the plankton back into the brine near a small rocky island.

Varda gasps. _Oh._

The plankton are glowing, little pinpricks of bright blue, tracing the swells and surges of the water in which they move. Together they form great ribbons of twinkling lights, weaving a path along the ocean’s surface that mirrors the great band of stars above.

Yavanna re-embodies herself on an outcropping of porous rock, lungs and teeth and trachea this time instead of gills or a blowhole. She trails an appendage through the water beneath her, and in her wake the plankton seem to swarm and flare even brighter.

“I made them for you,” she says. “As a gift. In gratitude for the comets, and the lamps.”

_They are like stars. Little living cousins for the stars._

“Yes.”

Varda coalesces into a soft glow that vaguely gestures at bilateral symmetry, pauses, and then coalesces further until she too has the necessary structures to form the syllables of Valarin from muscle and air. “Thank you.”

A shimmering ribbon of light twines its way around Yavanna’s waist, and Yavanna leans into the warm brightness to plant an affectionate kiss where the light-figure suggests a cheek. “It was my pleasure.”

Varda glows brighter in startlement at the kiss, and Yavanna laughs softly. “_Fanar_ lend themselves to uses other than crafting and dancing,” she says. She and Aulë have already conducted a great many experiments to that effect, but then, they spend much more time embodied than Manwë and Varda are wont to do.

“Oh?” says Varda. “Like this?” She solidifies the rest of her face and returns the kiss, this time to Yavanna’s lips.

Yavanna smiles into the kiss. “That is one of their better uses, yes,” she murmurs, and above and below them the stars and the plankton continue to glow.

***

In the Lamplight, Arda glows. Even from afar Varda can feel the life teeming upon the world they have built, she and her comrades. Mountains rise from the depths of the ocean to great heights; feathered, tough-beaked creatures cavort over the canopies of the great forests while each single tree beneath sustains a hundred different smaller creatures; and great scaled swimming reptiles ride the tides. Looking at it all, Varda makes a song of starlight on stone and water and trembling leaf.

Manwë’s winds rise to greet her, casting the scent of new growth far into the skies, and Varda reaches down to answer.

_We have wrought well,_ comes Manwë’s thought, _eäla_ greeting _eäla_ with a flood of love and warmth. _When the Children come, they will wake to a welcoming world._

Varda answers not with words but by opening her mind to him and pouring forth light. She taught him to dance, not long after Yavanna shared the ecstasy of it with her, but with Manwë her physical form need not be so defined. Instead she is starlight, streams of energy flowing through the winds that play far, far above even the tallest of Aulë’s mountains. She and her husband set the sky alight, great ribbons that stretch from horizon to horizon, undulating over continent and sea. From below, Varda can feel the others looking up, and she lets herself glow green, green for all of the life that covers Arda, that will sustain the children when they come.

Manwë’s thought sounds so close within her being that it might be her own: _A feast. Let us celebrate, for Arda is glorious in its Spring._

They gather on Almaren, where the light of the Lamps mingles and the plants grow verdant and tall. Varda finds Yavanna in the shape of a great tree, roots wrapping close and affectionate around a craggy, moss-covered boulder that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be Aulë. Ulmo stands beside them, laughing at something Yavanna has just said.

“I never doubted you,” he says. “I merely said it would be a challenge! And so it must have been, to devise a being of the _olvar_ or _kelvar_ that could survive in those conditions.”

Yavanna smiles. “I admit you and my husband did not make it easy!” A rounded opening in the bole of her _fana_ serves as her mouth for now, and whenever she speaks Varda catches a glimpse of a sleepy-looking owl and a trio of fluffy owlets who have taken up residence in the space. Yavanna is careful to speak around them, and it gives her a rather endearing lisp. Sensing Varda’s approach, she explains, “Aulë and Ulmo made vents in the depths of the sea, with water hot enough to scald most of my creatures flowing into water cold enough to freeze them. Then they dared me to make something that could live there anyhow!” She tosses her crown back, showering the ground behind her with tiny needles. “I have seen my grazers grow confused and clumsy after eating overripe fruit, and these two must have been in a similar state to come up with something like that.”

A cascade of scree rains down in mock indignation as Aulë protests, “We were experimenting!” He gives an emphatic tug at his beard, a curtain of moss hanging from a jutting shelf of rock. One of her roots curls around to stroke the back of his hand.

“An experiment like that is much like the hooves of a grazer drunk on fermented apples—too dangerous and clumsy to be inflicted on most plants or animals!”

“_We_ were not the ones responsible for overripe apples,” Aulë retorts, with the air of one delivering an unshakeable argument; but fingers of rock curl lovingly around the root. Their gestures of affection, Varda thinks, are very different from those she shares with Manwë.

Yavanna laughs, boughs trembling as if shaken by a strong breeze. “True enough.” She turns back to Varda. “Not to mention the pressure anything at that depth must withstand, and the lack of light—too far from the Lamps, and too deep even for starlight.”

Varda robes herself in a bipedal form, the shape familiar from the night she and Yavanna made a meteor shower, and asks, “How did you manage it, then?”

Yavanna reaches down a long bough, and Varda shrinks her _fana_ to a size that makes it easy to step delicately onto the tree limb. The bark is rough and warmly textured beneath her feet, and she gives herself a few extra nerve endings on her soles to enjoy the sensation.

“This form suits you,” Yavanna says, smiling. The owl hoots sleepily and, trusting Yavanna to let this new visitor do no harm to her young, blinks her eyes closed again. “I couldn’t do it with just one plant or animal. But with several, it was possible. Tiny creatures to take the chemicals from the thermal vent and turn it into useable food—there, I found a use for your sulphur, husband—and worms and limpets that could feed on those creatures’ by-products, right at the boundary between boiling and freezing, and also shelter those creatures from the current. And now,” she turns to Ulmo in triumph, “your ocean floor thermal vents have their own complete system of _olvar_ and _kelvar_!”

“A clever solution,” Varda says, as the stars in her hair twinkle with delight at her friend’s ingenuity. Yavanna has a knack for making creatures who sustain each other through complex interactions, like a trinary star system whose members depend on one another to remain in motion. Her methods are very different from Varda’s, but at moments like this the principles behind them seem to converge, different lines of harmony resolving to the same note.

Ulmo grins. “I’d call it cheating if I did not enjoy watching them so much.”

“Interdependence is not _cheating_,” Aulë jumps to his spouse’s defense.

Varda, meanwhile, has turned her attention to the view from the high boughs. It is a different way of perceiving, to look with eyes from up close rather than sense the entirety of Arda through the music of light and gravity, and it always takes her a moment to adjust to that double perception—but there, above the lake surrounding Almaren, she spots a pair of creatures of startling grace, feathered like many of those that already fly the skies, but with delicately curved necks and feathers white as the mingled light of the Lamps. The pair swoops low over the surface of the water, angling their wings to control their descent before beating them powerfully to brake. They land upon the lake still moving, trailing foaming wakes behind their webbed feet, until they slow enough to fold their wings and settle into a stately glide.

_What are those?_ she asks, reverting to mind-to-mind speech, for Aulë and Ulmo are still companionably bickering out loud at Yavanna’s roots.

_Swans. I only just made them,_ Yavanna answers. A slender tree branch draped with hanging moss curves around to curl across Varda’s shoulders. Varda draws the moss around her; the feathery softness of it is a pleasant contrast to the rough, ridged bark beneath her feet. This is, perhaps, another one of those things that _fana_r are especially good for. It takes her a moment to feel the evergreen needles combing through her hair, and she leans into that touch as well. Yavanna continues, almost tentative, _I was thinking of having them migrate. With stars to guide their way._

Varda turns to drop a kiss against the branch circling her shoulders; Yavanna gives her a gentle squeeze in response. _They are very beautiful. As graceful upon Ulmo’s waters as they are on Manwë’s winds._ An idea strikes her. _I should like to make one from stars. You have made my husband a great many birds. Let me make one for you. Then, if they must migrate, they will have one of their own to point the way._

The wave of pleasure that emanates from Yavanna’s _eäla_ at the words is warmer even than the cloak of moss, and Varda wraps it around herself with even greater joy.

Then she sees what is taking place by the lakeside, where Nessa is about to dance. She nudges an elbow against Yavanna’s bole. _Look at Tulkas._

Yavanna’s entire body, crown to root, quivers with mirth when she follows Varda’s gaze. _I do not think I have ever seen a Vala so smitten!_

Varda’s answering laugh twinkles like the stars in her hair. _I suspect we will not be the only ones who can call ourselves espoused by the end of this feast._

***

They are not ready when Melkor strikes, but in hindsight, Yavanna should have known.

The reefs and the marshlands had been the first to warn her of the blight. 

They began to sicken far from Almaren, and she berates herself for not noticing right away, but raising a rainforest is intricate and demanding work, so it is perhaps understandable that she did not hear the marsh-grass choking or the coral bleaching until the poison started to spread. But when she found one of her flowers stinking like corpseflesh, and one of her pollinators refashioned into a parasite that feeds on blood, and carries worse parasites within it, she recognised the handiwork at once.

Melkor. 

Yet neither reef nor marshland could tell her the source of the poison killing them, so neither she nor the rest of the Valar could find Melkor in time. 

After the feast, she is content, sensing the rapid heartbeats of the little owlets through her fana and looking out at the lake.

The sound of tearing earth jolts her from her reverie. 

And then, darkness. 

The Lamps are gone. 

In the confused chaos that follows she hardens her heart, and calls her creatures to each others’ defense, guarding close to her spirit the aeons she will spend grieving for their sacrifice. Animals with claw and tooth and venomous sting rise to battle to defend Almaren their home, but Yavanna can do little for the plants that depend on Lamplight: the delicate tundra shrubs growing near Illuin that are trampled beneath burning feet, never to grow again, and the great mats of mosses beneath Ormal that char and shrivel.

She feels each and every death. 

Great seaweed forests desiccate as Ormal’s flame pours into their waters. Trees join their boughs to shield siblings deeper in the jungles, but even those with bark tough enough to survive lightning strikes are no match for the fires of the Lamps. Tiny shelled creatures in the inland seas shrivel as their homes disappear.

The tundra withers. The seas evaporate. The forests burn. 

When the Lamp-fires die down, only starlight is left to illuminate the scarred remains of Almaren. Melkor and his followers have vanished, retreating into whatever stronghold hid them before. Entire species—entire networks of species—have been completely extinguished. 

Aulë is exhausted, having spent his strength restraining the earthquakes and volcanoes from causing even more damage, but Yavanna is determined to rebuild. She makes plants that thrive in ashy soil, trees with seed-cones that open under fire to renew the land afterward, drought-resistant succulents that will bring green to the deserts that remain in the wake of the inland seas. She remembers Eru’s words to Melkor: _He that attempteth to alter the Music in my despite shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined._ The memory gives her courage, and courage gives her inspiration. 

Even corpseflesh flowers might nourish the soil; even blood-sucking parasites might feed birds whose songs echo the Music itself. And, unexpectedly, some creatures she would not have guessed might survive are still present. Some of her hard-shelled insects have proved immune to the terrible radiation that destroyed larger animals’ bodies from the inside out; and a group of tiny but resilient creatures managed to devise a tactic of voiding themselves of water and entering a kind of stasis to survive the worst of the drought. They revive, to all appearances unscathed, when she returns them to water. It gives her hope. She may be able to come up with other strategies as well, to give her creatures a fighting chance when—not if, she knows—Melkor returns. And perhaps she will enhance their capacity for change, so that even without her direct guidance they can experiment, en masse, and so find ways to evade or withstand Melkor’s blight. 

Yavanna will rebuild.

So she is aghast when Manwë rules instead that they leave Arda sundered, and retreat into the West. 

“That we cannot find Melkor does not mean he is gone!” she protests, when Manwë and Varda draw the Valar to counsel. “Our works do not lie only in the West. Are we to abandon all we have wrought to his filth?”

“Not all,” Manwë responds, and around him the breezes and Yavanna’s own birds echo: _Not all, not all._ “A haven we will build, on Aman in the West, and there guard our works from Melkor’s dominion. We no longer have a home here, but there we will make a place of peace, and plenty.”

“It will be nothing of the sort for everything left here,” Yavanna retorts. She looks to Aulë for support, for until now she could always count on him to back her in the Valar’s counsels, but he looks away, a troubled set to his chin apparent even behind the beard. He guards most of his thought from her, but on the surface of his mind she sees a memory of earthquakes, smoke, and choking volcanic ash—and a twinge of what almost seems like guilt. 

“We would have to find him first,” Aulë says slowly. “And all our attempts to do so have failed.”

“That is no excuse! All of my first attempts at prokaryotes failed as well, until they didn’t!”

She turns to Varda instead. Varda saw through Melkor’s spirit from the first, and rejected him, though Manwë was more trusting. Surely Varda will take Yavanna’s side.

But her face, for all that it still carries the glow of starlight and Eru’s own radiance, is sorrowful. “I think we must withdraw.”

A few of the others argue for staying—Tulkas and Oromë, in particular, believe nothing is to be gained by letting Melkor remain hidden to nurse whatever malignancies he is planning now—but they are too few, and are overruled. 

Yavanna leaves the council in a cloud of wasps, which threaten to sting anyone who tries to approach her. 

It is Varda who finds her afterward. Wasp stings are no use against starlight. 

_I am sorry._

Yavanna is silent. She said what she had to say at the council. It wasn’t enough. 

_The _olvar_ and the _kelvar_ are no strangers to struggle, nor to death, I know._ The touch of Varda’s mind is gentle. _But they were meant to contend with each other, not with a clash of Valar._

Yavanna huffs. “They would not have to contend with a clash of Valar if we dealt with Melkor now.”

_He is hidden beyond even my sight, and Manwë’s. I do not believe we shall find him until he chooses to reemerge._

“He’ll only be stronger, then.”

_No doubt. And so any battle between us will be correspondingly more terrible. Look around you, dear one. Look at your jungles and your savannas and your estuaries and your wetlands. They all lie rent and bleeding, or else burned, or else submerged, and it was not Melkor’s hands alone that wrought the damage._

Yavanna recalls the faint note of guilt she sensed in Aulë’s memory. It had been he who called his own long-buried volcanoes to the surface to vent their flames lest they split the ground from below. It had been he who tore apart his carefully crafted rocky crust to release the pressure building there, and made the chasms into which her forests fell. 

And Yavanna herself drove many of her own creations to their demise, calling upon them to stand to Arda’s defense. They had answered—but at what cost?

_When the Children come,_ Varda went on, as if sensing her waver, _would you have them awaken to a land burning with the fires of war? _

“Would you have them wake instead to Melkor’s dominion?”

Varda is silent for a long time. _It may be that he will lie quiescent for a time; enough time for the land to heal and the Children to arise in freedom. I see no peril-free path forward, but better that than let them arise to a world so ruined by our contending that they have no way to live, and perish as soon as they draw breath. In Aman we may at least preserve a part of Arda free of Melkor’s influence, and we can prevent the further destruction of Middle-earth. There at least the _olvar_ and the _kelvar_ too may thrive._

“Little good that will do to the ones that sicken here.” But Yavanna knows she is out of arguments. The leaves twining through her hair and over her torso wither in defeat.

Varda wraps ribbons of light around her, enveloping Yavanna in warmth and sending a thrum of energy through her. It helps to revive her spirits despite herself. This is a comfort Aulë cannot give her, not yet, not when he is still so distraught himself, and she relaxes into it, letting Varda corporealise to support her weight. The wasps dissipate to return to their nest. 

Varda trails one mostly-solid hand along the edges of Yavanna’s ears, which are cupped and pointed like those of the hooved animals she made to gallop in magnificent herds across the steppes. She was especially proud of the balance she had wrought in their design: four legs under powerful withers and haunches, so carefully placed that the creatures needed to expend no effort at all to remain standing. Yet many had fallen, hamstrung by the whips and claws of Melkor’s followers. Yavanna’s ears tremble in grief. 

Varda’s hand ghosts over Yavanna’s cheek, then catches her chin to tilt it up. She presses a kiss to each of Yavanna’s eyelids, then to the soft linings of her still-quivering ears, and then to the tip of her nose. _Can you not take heart?_

Wrapped in warmth and light and love, Yavanna finds she can. “I will come West. Yet I will not wholly abandon Middle-earth.”

Varda glows. _I did not think you would, dear one._

***

The song reaches Varda upon Taniquetil. From Ezellohar far below it drifts up and out, a melody as rich and deep as the loamy soil of the mound, carrying the tremulous fragility of new green shoots as well as the steady power of the oldest and tallest tree trunks. It reverberates with life itself. Varda’s whole being is seized with an exquisite ache, light dancing in sympathy with the Music.

Others have already gathered by the time she robes herself in physical form and makes her way to Ezellohar. What greets her there is light. 

Not starlight—it is warmer and more intense than the starlight that reaches Arda from the great distances at which Varda has placed her works—and not Lamplight, either. Something brighter than the first and gentler than the second, and somehow more _alive_ than both. 

Treelight. 

Yavanna is singing two saplings out of the earth, and though they are not yet full-grown Varda can see, through the song, what they will become. Yavanna’s song speaks of renewal, of growth, of interconnectedness, of balance. It speaks of grief for life lost and works destroyed, and of strength learned through the work of rebuilding. It speaks of deep roots and warm soil, of clean rain and lively winds. The song goes on as Varda’s stars wheel overhead, and slowly Varda notices that in the light from the Trees, other life flourishes. The Lamps are gone, but this living light endures. 

Nienna sits weeping by the young Trees’ roots, and, listening, Varda almost wants to join her. She feels as though a weight she did not even know she was carrying has been lifted.

It is the first time Yavanna has sung since the destruction of Almaren. 

Varda reaches out with her mind, and with her own song, music flowing not through the air but through her very being. And Yavanna, hearing it, weaves it into her melody, just as they did at the very beginning of the Music, life and light entwined.

**Author's Note:**

> One hypothesis for the origin of life on Earth is that the necessary volatile compounds, which were not likely to have been abundant on early Earth, were supplied by bombardment from comets. There are other hypotheses, but that one seemed most apt for the pairing in this fic, so I ran with it.
> 
> My headcanon for pre-Sun auroras in Arda is that they were caused by Varda and Manwë dancing and/or getting intimate. (I mean, come on, emissions from a star exciting atoms in the upper atmosphere? It was just too perfect. Though I'm not sure what Arda's magnetic field would have been like in the Valar's first designs, so I've rather handwaved—er, totally ignored—that bit.)
> 
> The extremophiles Yavanna makes to satisfy Ulmo and Aulë's challenge include microbes that chemosynthesize compounds that spew from hydrothermal vents, tube worms that feed on some of the compounds the microbes produce, and bottom-feeders that thrive on microbial mats.
> 
> Certain migratory birds, such as mallard ducks, use stars (as well as the sun's position and other geographic features) to orient themselves during migration. I do not know if migratory swans do this as well, but for purposes of this fic, they do. The constellation Varda makes for Yavanna here is what stargazers in the English-speaking world would know as Ursa Minor or the Little Dipper. I envision Polaris as the swan's beak-point. (It's possible I'm forgetting something somewhere in HoME that suggests a different name/backstory for this constellation; if so, I'm cheerfully ignoring it.)
> 
> In this fic, mosquitos and rafflesia are Morgoth's work, but Yavanna manages to repurpose them to be useful to her ecosystems. (She doesn't quite succeed at eradicating malaria, though.) I am convinced cockroaches and tardigrades would survive anything Morgoth could throw at them.


End file.
